


The Format Age

by Kurremkarmerruk



Category: Myst Series
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 21:34:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurremkarmerruk/pseuds/Kurremkarmerruk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Stranger travels to an early lost age written by Atrus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Format Age

The sensation of my transference is as always one of bewitching abandonment. I find myself bystanding in a crime scene’s balmy solace. We’re familiars now. The star here is like the one that rises on Myst, but it’s farther away, smaller, ancient amber in comparison. It crawls like an antique on many rays across the archipelago. This age, Format, is just as Atrus describes it in the notebook. Many islands are visible from the shores of this one and the days here are long as if to accentuate its repeating vasts. I felt the cold wandering data of the winds on my palm as I linked. I am surrounded by towering larch-like trees, bulging ramparts of moss. The air confuses comfort with discomfort. And the sea, as promised, is a slush of lilac-colored algae.

Atrus’ signature gadgetry is sparse but unmissable. A flotilla of batteries, tethered to a southerly point, gathers tidal or so-called “undulate energy” from the algae.  At dusk the bobbing array whirs to life and a small automated light activates on a hill a mile or so away. Nothing that walks but me takes notice or gives notice of itself and I follow a seasons-buried conduit through the branches to Atrus’ Format bungalow.

The structure bears the same eerie newness as those I’ve entered on other ages. No one has been here for twenty years. But then this is a haven-period age; not built for weather or populations. The cot is unmade but the basin immaculate. A folio of rushed sketches. A chest of tunics and undergarments. Folded artfully, a map of the surrounding islands, all the same size and shape. Old summits of old volcanoes. A geological oddity Atrus fabricated as a metaphor for something. Sirrus’ and Achenar’s flair for contraband and evidence exhibitionism must have come from Catherine. Or a recessive gene. I found also a pen which was dried up. A chisel set.

I sleep on Atrus’ cot and in the day that breaks two hours later set out for the east cliffs. They shatter down from the trees gradually. Tideless, the mass of the sea meets their violence in a sleepy eczematous pavane. I clamber down through eyries and shorescrub to a lookout point indicated on the map. This world smells like matches. It does not object to me with the jigsaw of aftermaths I wound through on Channelwood and Selenitic. There are no strange switches here that only under very special circumstances do anything. It is not a story. It is a study of sunken eruptions.

I witness the vacant purple abeyance Atrus sentenced this age to for some time. My eyes idle the unchanging. Realizing vaguely that I have my traveler’s erection, I masturbate stoically, forgetfully, functionally, like sleep. It’s a sorting through. In the distance the age breaks, or experiences interruption, when something not alive but made by the living strafes into view from behind an outlying island. It is dark and fast. It is a vehicle. It stops in midair, miles away. I realize I’m afraid, a wire crosses, I’m excited, I stand up, my hand still between my legs, I panic and I come, off the cliff, into the sea. A moment later the craft disappears behind another island. I watch my and the alien biota fail to integrate. Perhaps though it’s being converted into watts. Into tonight’s light. The slight web between my thumb and index is wet. I forget. I make my way back through the gnats and inert of the morning.

Approaching the bungalow’s east-facing window I look in and see Atrus has arrived, as he said he would. He is sitting on the cot, performing the same function I was on the cliff. It’s the same for him I realize. He comes gently, plainly, wiping his hand on a blanket. I go inside.

“I saw something,” I say.

“I don’t know who they are,” he says at last. “Or what they are. They’re not indigenous to this planet.” Atrus leaves the matter at that and then continues. “I wrote this age when I was twenty-eight. After Inception. This is the fourth. Polysemy came next, but it was amongst those my sons destroyed.”

He reaches into his vest and produces a Linking Book. “You must go now, contrary to our previous arrangement. I’m sorry.” He reaches for my hand, holds it and pulls. Our remnant stickinesses mingle, and I imagine them agreeing and colluding, but there’s no way of telling now. The content of our habits will dry up. I do not know where I am about to appear with the age-writer’s ejaculate written over my own like a palimpsest. He holds the Linking Book open in his other hand and speaks.

“This is a very old planet whose cataclysms have played out. It is not like us.” Spoken like a next, not a last, rite, he places my hand like a dead man’s on the panel and I vanish. 


End file.
